WITH the heavily rumoured launch of the latest Apple iPhone looming on the horizon, staff of Verizon Wireless, the largest US mobile operator, are said to have had their annual leave scheduled for mid-September cancelled. The company is gearing up for the expected demand from the hordes of Mac fans, and all hands are needed on deck.
Meanwhile, in another corner of the sprawling Verizon empire, Andrew Dobbins also has his hands full trying to meet demand for the telecom and IT services that the group provides in Asia-Pacific.
"Singapore is now my fastest-growing market," says Dobbins, vice-president, Asia-Pacific, of Verizon Communications, in an interview with Management@Work of The Edge Singapore. "This is a mature market, yes, but we are heavily invested in servicing the financial services industry here."
New York-based Verizon Communications, which runs the fixed line and IT services business and has nearly 190,000 employees, is the former Bell Atlantic Corp, which in turn was one of the seven so-called "Baby Bells" that were created from the break-up of the then American telecom behemoth, AT&T.
For FY2011, its annual revenue of more than US$110 billion ($138 billion) earned it 16th place on the Fortune 500 list. Its net profit was US$2.4 billion. Verizon Wireless is 55%-owned by Verizon Communications, with the rest held by UK-based Vodafone.
Dobbins, who worked in telecommunications companies (telcos) such as Telstra and Orange before joining Verizon, is on familiar ground. Appointed to his current role in 2007, he had a ringside view of how many US and European companies expanded their businesses in Asia, particularly Singapore, as quickly as they could, driven especially by those in the financial services industry.
Dobbins says the subsequent global financial crisis did not cause customers to stop spending entirely. "We didn't see a dramatic decrease in revenue, but customers do want to do different things," he says. Not surprisingly, they want more bang for their buck and, with the improvement in technology, they have started to buy various types of products and services.
Companies such as Verizon compete with other multinational telcos to offer a suite of communications, data traffic management and security services, typically for large enterprise customers. Some recent customer wins for Verizon in this region have been the Australian Department of Defence, Global Gossip, iYogi and Hong Kong's MTR Corp.
One such emerging service area for carriers such as Verizon is in the provision of cloud computing infrastructure — a trend that is further accentuated when mobile connection and services for enterprise users surge.
The way Dobbins sees it, customers have gone beyond the "buy and test" stage.
While cloud computing infrastructure sounds good on paper — helping customers cut down heavy upfront capital expenditure so that they pay for only what they use — there were major problems, including security. There was also plenty of debate over the viability of different types of "cloud": public, private and hybrid.
Dobbins says such issues have largely been addressed and, along with deeper and wider implementation of cloud computing infrastructure, Verizon's own customers are starting to generate their own revenue, leveraging on the use of this new way of delivering products and services.
To better ride this trend, Verizon in August last year bought CloudSwitch, a software company whose product allows users in large business organisations to move their applications and data easily between their own data centres, and public and private clouds. "That's the real power of the cloud, and it's a big thing for enterprises," says Dobbins.
Verizon's main hardware infrastructure in Asia is now in Hong Kong, but there are plans to build a network access point, which helps manage traffic and which Verizon plans to lease to other telcos besides using it for its own customer traffic. "We are finalising our investment plan," says Dobbins, declining to provide further details for now.
He believes such investments, which will not come cheap, are "absolutely critical" in key financial centres such as Hong Kong and Singapore. To address the needs of customers in this sector, Verizon is offering services tailored to their requirements, specifically, the "lowest latency available" in moving the data from point A to point B, he says.
The latency, or lag, in network traffic could translate into the difference between making millions in profits or losses, for major money movers such as banks, hedge funds and trading firms.
While serving the financial services industry is critical, Verizon is also seeing growth coming from other industries, including healthcare. To this end, it recently bought over Hughes Telematics Inc for US$612 million. Huges Telematics sells tracking and communication systems used in the automotive industry.
Dobbins says three of the largest Asian car brands with a manufacturing presence in the US are Hughes Telematics users. Once the company comes under the Verizon fold, the deployment of such technology can be expected in even more industries, such as healthcare and home automation. — The Edge Singapore
This story appeared in The Edge Singapore on Sept 3, 2012.